I deal with helping people get US visas. One day a bachur came over to me and asked me to arrange a visa for him immediately. That same day, this bachur’s mother called me and said, “My son came and asked you to take care of a visa for him. I am begging you – do whatever you can to make sure he does not get approved for the visa. Unfortunately, he has left the proper path, and I am very worried about him. If he leaves Eretz Yisrael he’s liable to lose the last shred of Yiddishkeit left in him. I just don’t want him to intermarry there!”
Who could stand the tears of a Yiddisheh mother asking to save her son from falling into the pit of Gehinnom? I promised I would do everything I could.
I couldn’t refuse to help the bachur, but I assisted him only in technical matters, without advising him what to do. On his application he wrote that he was unmarried, and in the American consulate they don’t like allowing bachelors to enter the U.S. He also wrote that he was looking to make money, something that also makes it very improbable that he would get approved, because Americans don’t like poor people. The bachur took the documents he’d prepared and, quite unexpectedly, the visa was approved.
The boy’s mother left no stone unturned. She called me and told me she was sending a messenger to pick up the visa for her son, and he would make marks on it and ruin it, so it would be invalidated.
The messenger came to take the visa, but I told him, “That bachur was here before you. He came on his own and took the visa.”
The family members were very hurt. The mother was totally crushed. She had been working so hard to protect her son as much as she could, and here she was not seeing any siyata d’Shmaya. Her son got the visa in a totally unnatural way. It seemed that the mother had davened from the depths of her heart, and all the tears she shed for the sake of her son were so effective that even when she tried to block the path leading toward his rescue, she did not succeed.
In the end, the bachur went to the U.S. and met up with some special yungeleit. They took an interest in him, spoke to his heart, and gave him chizuk. They would not give up on him, and with extreme dedication, ahavas Yisrael and a feeling of achrayus, they helped him to do teshuvah and get back on track.
Several months passed, and his mother called to tell me, “My son wants to come back to Israel, and I fear he will meet up with his old friends and will be drawn to them again, chalilah. Please, do everything you can so that he will not be able to get back to the country...”
